The Pirate Bay moves to the cloud

The Pirate Bay migrated its entire operation to the cloud on Wednesday, Torrentfreak.com reports. Pirate Bay officials say this move in effect makes the site raid proof. The popular search engine used to find torrents, or small information files that allow the downloading of content from the BitTorrent peer-to-peer system.

The Pirate Bay’s backend is spread across several cloud servers worldwide, which all run a virtualised copy of the server containing the site’s data. If one server is taken down by authorities, the site’s backend can route traffic to a copy of the server that remains online. Similar setups are used by major websites like Amazon, and it results in more reliable service and increased uptime.

Swedish police last raided The Pirate Bay back in May 2006, resulting in the seizure of 25 servers across five locations. Following that raid, the site’s administrators took additional steps to further conceal the locations of their servers, although the site says it has been told it is in the sights of the Swedish authorities once again.

“The Swedish district attorney Fredrik Ingblad initiated a new investigation into The Pirate Bay back in 2010,” the site writes in its blog. “Since our recent move to a .SE domain, the investigation has been cranked up a notch.” Taken at face value, those comments seem to indicate another raid may be in the not-too-distant future.

But is The Pirate Bay really raid proof? There is action law enforcement could take in order to make things difficult for the site’s administrators.

Authorities could take down the pieces of the network which direct traffic to the virtual servers. This work would need to be done quickly: after eight hours of no communication with the network, those virtual servers shut down automatically. Once that happens, they cannot be restarted without a password.

Even then that might not mean much—all data on these servers are encrypted. So while The Pirate Bay might not yet be “raid proof,” it certainly has become exponentially more difficult to control.